ORONO – Several internationally known computer code-writers recently helped students in the University of Maine New Media program examine the mystery of power and authority of the Internet in a series of workshops titled Cracking the Codes.

Artist Eryk Salvaggio and software developer Ryan Genz guided students in their exploration of new applications of both the art and science of code-writing – the basis of programming. Also participating were Dutch Internet artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who work under the pseudonym “jodi” and are two of the most celebrated artists working online today, said organizers Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais, assistant professors in UMaine’s New Media Program. The workshops ran this spring.

In keeping with the seamless global nature of the Internet, the series included a video conference in the university’s new Collaborative Media Lab at Fogler Library, which connected students with software experts from New York, Tel Aviv, Montreal and Massachusetts. Topics included collaborating in a politically charged environment, online performance art, video streaming and oral history recording, which are some of the components of the UMaine new media curriculum.

Heemskerk and Paesmans joined the students through video conferencing to offer a remote demonstration of hacking the computer game, “Quake,” in addition to demonstrating other “mind-altering experiments in corrupted code,” said Blais and Ippolito.

The field of new media encompasses activities revolving around the impact of digital media on images, artwork, video and intellectual concepts extending well into politics, philosophy, culture, ethics and values, said Blais and Ippolito.

Undergraduate and graduate students in the UMaine program learn the basics of computer programming and artistic expression through programs as common as Adobe Photoshop for photograph and image manipulation and as complex as Web site development using code-writing tools like DHTML or Flash.

Yet the focus of the new media program is not the tools themselves, “but how to re-imagine the world using those tools,” said Ippolito.

Internet artists, said Blais, would like to strip away commercialization from art by making it available free on the Internet and to inspire people to think about alternative ways to perceive the world and its powerbrokers.

Hackers, computer program writers who infiltrate other people’s computer operating systems and coders who use the same skills for less mischievous ends “are really trying to alert us to the existence of power,” Blais said.

Through coding, the language of computers, “we are increasingly finding society and the world shaped physically, philosophically, culturally and politically,” she said.

Salvaggio’s and Genz’s visit, and the video conference with jodi, exposed students to the expertise and ideas of some of the most accomplished code-writers and Net artists in the world, Blais and Ippolito said.

Eryk Salvaggio, http://salsabomb.com, is a former graffiti artist and author who works from his home in Ogunquit. Ryan Genz teaches anthropology and interaction design at Rockport College in Maine and lectures in Canada, Turkey and throughout the United States. Jodi’s Web site is http://jodi.org.

Blais and Ippolito are the founders of Still Water, created within the university’s new media program in 2002.

The Still Water Web site is http://newmedia.umaine.edu/stillwater/. Blais and Ippolito may be reached for more information by e-mailing jblais@maine.edu, or jippolito@maine.edu.